Cutting record intake in half across a 34,000-patient academic health system.

Academic health systemMulti-hospital academic medical center · 34,000 patients/yr

Outside records arrived as faxes, uploads, and HIE call-backs — over 30,000 hours of manual review a year. Fourier now classifies and structures them before staff touch a page, returning 15,000+ hours annually and paying for itself in three and a half months.

Data Intake & StructuringClinical Intelligence
34,000
Patients per year across the health system.
15,367
Hours returned annually to HIM and clinical teams.
$655K
Net annual savings, after the Fourier investment.
3.5×
First-year return on investment.

30,000 hours a year just making records usable.

Every patient who arrives with outside records — transfers, referrals, second opinions — triggers the same manual ritual: someone in HIM opens the stack, works out what each page is, files it, and flags what the clinical team needs to see. At 34,000 patients a year and roughly 45 minutes per patient, record review alone consumed 25,500 hours annually. Completeness checks and chart prep for 4,000 new patients added 3,300 more.

With a 10% rework rate on top — misfiled pages, missing documents chased after the fact — the system was spending 30,733 hours, about $1.84M in fully loaded labor, every year before a single clinical decision was made.

Automation embedded where the work already happens.

Fourier deployed inside the EHR via SMART on FHIR — no new logins, no workflow change, adoption built in. Records are classified, linked, and summarized before staff open them.

01

Auto-classification at intake

4,000–6,000 records per hospital, per day, classified and filed automatically — no more manual sorting of faxes, uploads, and HIE call-backs.

02

Specialty-specific summaries

Oncology, cardiology, fertility, neurology, and more — one platform serves every service line.

03

Clinical-grade accuracy

Fewer than 1 in 500 clinically significant findings missed, versus roughly 1 in 20 with frontier LLMs.

04

Cited, audit-ready output

Every finding linked to its source page — the medico-legal defensibility a teaching hospital requires.

Half the intake effort, returned to higher-value work.

With half of intake effort auto-handled, the system gets back an average of 45 minutes per patient — 15,367 hours a year, reclassified from sorting pages to the HIM and clinical work that actually needs people.

3.5×

Return on investment

Labor saved vs the annual Fourier investment, year one

3.5 mo

Payback period

Time for labor savings to cover the Phase 1 investment

THE MANUAL BASELINEAnnual · $60/hr blended HIM + clinical
Record review
34,000 patients × 45 min
25,500 hrs · $1.53M
Completeness review & chart prep
4,000 new patients × 50 min
3,333 hrs · $200K
Manual rework
10% of cases
1,900 hrs · $114K
Total manual effort
30,733 hrs · $1.84M
THE FOURIER MODELModeled · 50% intake-effort reduction
Hours returned via automation
Records auto-handled before staff touch them
15,367 hrs/yr
Equivalent FTE-years reclassified
At 2,080 hours per FTE
7.4
Labor cost savings
$922,000
Fourier Phase 1 investment
Annual
$267,065
Net annual savings
$654,935

Financial figures are modeled jointly with the health system from its own patient volumes and blended labor rates, applied to Fourier's measured intake-effort reduction. Accuracy figures are measured on Fourier production output.

The companion study: what the same system did with the reclaimed capacity

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